Performance shock

Peter Lieverdink ubuntu at cafuego.net
Sun Aug 7 23:12:32 UTC 2005


On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 11:32 -0400, MrKnisely wrote:
> Peter Lieverdink wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 02:35 -0400, pszilard wrote:
> > 
> >>I am just experimenting with Ubuntu and noticed that using the local
> >>100Mbps ethernet connection I could transer a 2GB file to Samba almost
> >>wtice as fast as to an XP Pro file server. What is even more
> >>interesting is that Ubuntu is running on my test PC which is a 700MHz
> >>Pentium with 256MB ram, whereas the XP file server was on a 2.4GHz P4
> >>with 512MB DDRAM.
> >>
> >>The peak transfer speed was only slightly higher, but Samba was able to
> >>"take" the entire file in one stream, whereas XP was pausing between
> >>chunks.
> >>
> >>Anyone else try similar?
> >>-paul
> >
> >No sorry, Netcraft have conclusively shown that you must be imagining
> >things. Please check http://www.microsoft.com/getthefacts/ for more
> >details. If there is still a discrepancy after that, you should order a
> >Windows 2003 Server license (and a new Quad Xeon machine) to fix the
> >problem ;-)
> >
> >Cheers, with a grin,
> >- Peter.
> >
> MY GOD, that was a good laugh.  Thanks for the humor.
> 
> Mike K.

On a slightly more serious note though; yes, Linux/samba has pretty much
always been faster on any file serving system I've ever used. (Notable
exception when using samba to write to a usb key, Linux didn't seem to
like that very much).

I think the Linux default setup tries to cache I/O as much as it can and
flushes to disk whenever it feels like. Windows doesn't (crashes too
often to rely on ram cache?) and that would kill performance. I think
the ram cache on XP Pro is only a few Mb anyway and would need tuning
(Netcraft!) before it started performing more acceptably.

- P.





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